CHEKHOV at COLBY

(A summary)

On a pleasant, mostly sunny, early fall weekend on the campus of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, not one but two centenary conferences devoted to Chekhov were convened by their organizers, Julie de Sherbinin of Colby College and Michael Finke of Washington University in St. Louis. These conferences, in turn, were but two of the events of a Chekhov Centenary Festival held at the college through September and October. Two films--Chekhovian Motifs (2003), directed by Kira Muratova, and Four Funny Families (2004), directed by V. Ulea (Vera Zubarev)-- and a one-act play--Carol Rocamora's I'll take your hand in mine… , based on the Chekhov-Knipper letters and touchingly performed by Kim Gordon and Richard Sewell--served to kick-off the conferences. The next day, Thursday, October 7th, the North American Chekhov Society held four double sessions, at which more than 25 papers were read. One session was devoted to The Cherry Orchard, in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of its premiere, and other panels were devoted to Chekhov and Death , The Legacy of Chekhov's Drama, and Chekhov and Film. In addition, two sessions were focussed on the study of individual stories by Chekhov--stories such as "Khoristka," "Duel'," "V rodnom uglu," "Po delam sluzhby," "Sluchai iz praktiki," and the so-called "malen'kaia trilogiia." The presenters were a wonderful mix of younger and older scholars together with some independent scholars, all of whom, if I may be permitted a very personal note, demonstrated an impressive enthusiasm for the writer they commemorated. The day ended with a video presentation, Brace Up!, of an avant-garde performance based on Chekhov's Three Sisters by the Wooster Group of Manhattan.

On Friday and Saturday the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored a symposium addressing the issue of Chekhov the Immigrant: Translating a Cultural Icon. The symposium marked the impact of Chekhov on American culture by bringing together, as the organizers wrote, "prominent scholars, translators, theater practitioners, writers, public critics and specialists in the medical humanities to discuss their perspectives on Chekhov's life and writings, assess Chekhov's significance for their particular disciplines, and present their own new work."

Professor Savely Senderovich of Cornell University and Professor Robert Jackson of Yale University, two teachers who have devoted a large part of their academic lives both writing on Chekhov and influencing a generation of American scholars and critics, opened the symposium with a session on Chekhov's Poetics. Professor Senderovich, in his paper "Two Opposing Approaches to the Problem of Incidental Detail in Chekhov's Poetics," corrected Aleksandr Chudakov's interpretation of Chekhovian details, noting that they only seem to be irrelevant and pointing to the hidden meanings they insinuate. Professor Jackson's paper, "Rothschild's Fiddle Revisited," elucidated the story's rich exploration of the Eastern Orthodox model of crisis, repentance, and redemption, a pattern accomplished by the return from exile through memory and suffering of Chekhov's prodigal hero. The next panel devoted to Chekhov and American Literature featured presentations by three American academics, Katherine O'Connor of Boston University, Andrew Durkin of Indiana University, and Julie de Sherbinin from Colby College. In her paper, "Writing in English with a Chekhov Muse," Katherine O'Connor mentioned Katherine Mansfield's version of "Spat' khochetsia" but went on to introduce many of us to the delightful play, s, by John Ford Noonan. Andrew Durkin's "Hunters off the Beaten Track: The Dismantling of the Pastoral Myth in Chekhov and Crane" compared Chekhov's parodic treatment of pastoral with Hart Crane's rejection of his pastoral tradition, and Julie de Sherbinin's paper, "American Iconography of Chekhov," commented on a series of pictorial images of Chekhov and the aspects of his personality and creativity that these images projected and even created.

The afternoon session began with an informal translators' roundtable moderated by Carol Flath of Duke University. The celebrated wife and husband team, Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, and Peter Constantine talked with each other and with the audience, giving away not only the secrets of the way they worked but also some revealing disclosures about the various writers they translated. They, of course, commented on the works of Chekhov, noting which of his works they especially liked or disliked and isolating the features of Chekhov's prose that were easy to convey in English and those difficult to capture simply, directly, economically. Later in the afternoon four novelists and critics, James McConkey, Claire Messud, Francine Prose, and James Wood offered generous and lively testimonies and discussions about how Chekhov had affected, if not influenced, their writing, their teaching, and, in some particularly moving comments, their lives. Some of the works they singled out were Sakhalin Island, "The Lady with a Pet Dog," and "Rothschild's Fiddle."

In the evening Gull, a new adaptation of Chekhov's Seagull, was presented at Strider Theater on the Colby campus. The production by LightBox, a theater company known for its ensemble work and its sensually heightened productions, was directed by Ellen Beckerman. She also participated in a discussion with the audience following the performance.

The first session on Saturday morning was titled: "Doctor/Patient, Author/Reader: Conflicting & Conflating Identities." Conevery Bolton Valencius, a Senior Fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, M.I.T., spoke on Sakhalin Island as a typical example of medical geography, a type of scientific discourse popular in the nineteenth century that fell out of favor at the end of that century but was rehabilitated at the end of the twentieth. This type of scientific writing emphasized the accumulation of facts and figures about the environmental factors informing on, if not actually determining the physiological and psychological and, ultimately, moral condition of the human beings living in the studied surroundings. Absolutely central to the methodology of Chekhov's study of Sakhalin and to this type of discourse, which sought to isolate and organize medical knowledge, was the technique of careful observation and measurement of the local facts and features. But, of course, what Chekhov's study exposed was the failure of medical geography, that is, the senseless discrepancy between what actually existed on the island and what would exist under a Russian penal system governed by science. In his paper, "Heal Thyself, Hide Thyself: Why Did Chekhov Ignore His TB?," Michael Finke explored the reasons, both conventional and idiosyncratic, that Chekhov concealed his medical condition. And in part the myth he created for and of himself, the image of the man "squeezing the slave out of himself drop by drop" played a role in his evading a medical examination by another doctor that would have revealed certain naturalistic facts about his past and that of his family, which he preferred to keep buried. Professor Cathy Popkin of Columbia University presented the session's last paper, "Doctor without Patients/Man without a Spleen: Chekhov's Practice." She began by noting the many pseudonyms Chekhov used at the beginning of his career, postulating that their number was related to the many activities in which Chekhov as a young and healthy man was engaged. Such a plurality of identities may, she suggested, be generated by the lack of a fundamental identity. And perhaps one of Chekhov's most important last stories, "The Bishop," reiterates at the beginning, middle, and end of the story, where the hero divests himself of all that he had acquired in his spectacular rise in the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, the value of the lack of a distinct, separate identity.

The second Saturday morning session began with a videotaped interview of Dr. Robert Coles (Department of Psychiatry, Harvard University), the title of which was "Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams." Coles, who was too sick to attend the conference, began by recalling his introduction to Chekhov, when the story "Aniuta" was recommended to him by the poet and doctor, William Carlos Williams. This short prose classic together with such later works as "Ward No. 6" at first taught Coles and later continued to remind him of how much doctors had to learn from their patients and how much the ill, the sick, and the weak had to teach all who are more fortunate. The strength of Coles's memories and the vibrancy of his words in the light of the disease that was in the process of sapping his energy brought tears to the eyes of many viewers. The session concluded with an extended conversation directed by Richard Kahn, M.D. and Professor Michael Finke to initiate an exchange of ideas among the teachers and critics of Chekhov and medical practioners in the audience, an exchange that will, it is to be hoped, continue and become even more fertile in the future. The stories mentioned by Dr. Coles and later stories,"Po delam sluzhby" and "Sluchai iz praktiki," were the focus of this first discussion.

Saturday's afternoon sessions were preceded by a lecture by Laurence Senelick, of Tufts University, who, in connection with his recent translations of Chekhov's plays, reprised the topic of Chekhovian details sounded in the opening session. He taught us all how important it was to respect what Chekhov intended these details to convey and then to communicate these details, especially the recurring words, phrases, and images, as cleanly and simply and repeatedly as did their creator. After a short coffee break the panel on Chekhov and drama was initiated by Svetlana Evdokimova of Brown University who read a paper titled "Chekhov's Trouble with Theatre: The Undramatic Drama." She was followed by Spencer Golub, also from Brown, who gave a dazzling performance of his paper entitled "Incapacity." Sharon Carnicke (University of Southern California) in her paper, "The Nasty Habit of Adapting Chekhov's Plays," discussed the problems of presenting Chekhov in English, and Anna Muza of the University of California at Berkeley discussed in her paper, "The Sound of a Distant Thunder: Chekhov's Theater in Tom Stoppard's Russian Trilogy." the faint, recent echoes of Chekhov on the English stage.

The last session, devoted to performance practice, began with Michael Heim (University of California at Los Angeles), the subject of whose paper was perfectly reflected in its title, "Translating Chekhov's Plays: Collaboration between the Translator and the Director and the Actors." He also mentioned he tried to craft for American audiences a linguistic medium that gave them the impression that they were listening to another language, but one that was nevertheless comprehensible. Carol Rocamora (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) in her paper, "Must There Be a Cherry Orchard in s?: Directors' Perceptions of Chekhov," recalled both the problems she had to face during her production of the play in Philadelphia and some inventive solutions. The festival closed with a paper by Alexander Popov of the Moscow Art Theater. In his short and lively paper, "Cherries Dried, Pickled and Jammed: American and Russian Students Study Chekhov," he contrasted Russian and American approaches to Chekhov's theater and theatricality and pointed out that Americans take a too serious approach to Chekhov. They worship in the church of Chekhov and too often fail to recognize how much fun it is "to play at Russian doom and gloom," how much Chekhov allows them to display their thespian skills and gifts.

The Chekhov centenary conferences concluded with a gala reception and banquet in the impressive new wing of the Colby College Museum of Art. Good wine, short speeches, and good cheer marked this closing event, which was attended by so many of the participants in what was surely, as the President of Colby College, William Adams, remarked at the opening of the symposium, "the largest group of Chekhov specialists ever to meet in Maine."

© R.Lindheim

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